James Carroll is an author and Boston Globe columnist who dissected problems with the association of Islam and fascism in a Jan. 21, 2008, op-ed in The New York Times, “Islamofascism’s ill political wind.”

Chung Hyun Kyung is associate professor of ecumenical theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. A lay theologian of the Presbyterian Church of Korea, she was once a temporary Buddhist novice nun. Her interests include feminist and eco-feminist theologies and spiritualities from Asia, Christian-Buddhist dialogue and Zen meditation. She wrote Struggle to Be the Sun Again: […]

Read a Sept. 24, 2006, New York Times story which discusses Bush’s use of the term “Islamofascism” and the controversy it generated.

Read an Oct. 1, 2006, “On Language” column by William Safire of The New York Times, which discusses the roots and meanings of the word.

Read a Sept. 11, 2007, post by David Bernstein at the blog Volokh Conspiracy, which has a critical discussion of the term.

Read the Wikipedia entry on Islamofascism. Because Wikipedia is an open-source site, journalists should double-check references and citations. But the entry does provide a good overview of the origins and meanings of the term.

Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, who grew up in India, is a religion professor at Emory University in Atlanta whose specialties include Muslim and Hindu popular traditions.

Jonathan Y. Tan, who was born in Malaysia, is a theology professor at Xavier University, Cincinnati. He teaches courses on Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.

Adherents.com provides a list of the numbers of people who self-identify as members of major world religions.